


evergreen

by bog gremlin (tomatocages)



Series: hogwarts au [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Alternate Universe - Magic, Dryad Shiro (Voltron), Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Graduation, Trees, Vacation, Wizard Keith (Voltron), Wizard Shiro (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:00:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27830092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomatocages/pseuds/bog%20gremlin
Summary: Shiro and Keith Apparate to California and visit the Redwoods. There’s a ghost in the forest; it makes Shiro wonder what their future might hold.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: hogwarts au [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2036893
Comments: 6
Kudos: 53





	evergreen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sinspiration](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinspiration/gifts).



> ils asked for a continuation of my [sheith hogwarts au](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27608380) and gave the prompt: "they see the redwoods!! none of them are Shiro's cousins but they get to stand in awe and look at them and think about the future (trees can live forever, but wizards can live a long time too)"

Shiro doesn’t have any cousins in the redwood grove, but he does have an old potions partner who works in a lab about two hours outside the park. She has a garden: Keith pitches a tent and Shiro takes off his shoes, burying his feet in the California dirt and feeling out the pitch and roll of the land. It’s been a dry summer and they’re on the edge of a vineyard, so the soil is poor and volcanic. This, more than anything else, is what makes him feel as though he’s in a foreign country. 

Keith upends a Nalgene over Shiro’s toes and smiles at the way the water mixes with the dust. He’s careful to pour so he doesn't disturb the crickets that keep bounding around the yard, leaping from stem to stalk to Keith’s shirt and back again; but it’s a loss. Garden insects come out in droves around Shiro and drink little lips of the water dripping from his rooting toes. 

They haven’t rented a car. They’re wizards; Keith’s Apparition license came through six weeks before they left their apartment and he’s spent the run-up practicing in increasingly bizarre ways. Shiro doesn’t mind so much. He hates apparating, personally, because it;s a perennial shock: one moment on the good earth, the next hurtling through space, and landing somewhere that might be another climate entirely. Shiro’s flexible, as far as dryads go, but he still likes to know what he’s getting into. 

“Mbolu said to tell you she’s got wine if you want it,” Keith says. Both he and Shiro are too young to drink according to the laws of California, not that Keith seems to mind the restriction; he’s a lightweight, and limits alcohol consumption to the privacy of their own flat. Mbolu was a Ravenclaw and as such is fairly law-abiding, but even she can see the hilarity of denying a _tree_ a drink based on his external age. Shiro’s body is twenty, but the sap in his veins, the seed he sprung from — all that is much older. Not as old as some of the redwoods, though. 

In the morning, Shiro links elbows with Keith and can’t help but send out a few whippy shoots to help anchor them closer together before they Apparate out of Mbolu’s tiny yard. He braces himself for the nauseating lurch as they come into being at the foot of a tree that’s so old — so grand — so _big_ — that the willow grove back home can’t compare. Willow trees don’t grow so tall, though they can get almost as wide around, and this is one of the smaller redwoods Keith was able to find coordinates for. 

Shiro kicks off his sandals and shuffles his roots into the soft loam of the forest floor, making a little space for Keith to sit on his feet and lean against the structure of Shiro’s shins and knobby knees. They both settle in. It’s a bright day, even with the canopies blocking out much of the sun, and the air this close to the ground is cool and damp, a bit like it is back home.

It’s loud in the wood. All woods are loud: Shiro missed the sounds when he moved into the city, a sacrifice he was willing to make so he could better wait for Keith. Even now, these sounds come at a cost, because Shiro’s on holiday from his word as a magical potions researcher. It’s nothing very glamorous; mostly he goes through baskets of herbs in the stock room and touches things to see if they’re dry, or dead, or just gone useless in the humidity. When this trip to California ends, Keith’s going to seek his fortune and Shiro is worried he’ll feel alone again. 

“Huh,” Keith says, and Shiro can feel the vibration of his voice in his shins, traveling up his bark skin. Keith’s voice is a good sound, worth more than the birds propositioning each other and the squirrels’ determined overeating. Keith’s voice is lovelier even than the sound of an earthworm tunneling through the earth, swallowing and excreting soil in one of the more mundane forms of transmutation the world has to offer. 

“What is it?”

“Oh, just noticing things,” Keith says. He reaches up and tugs at the long drape of the cardigan Shiro’s wearing. “Look there: it’s a ghost.”

And it is.

Not a ghost like they grew used to back at school, or the ones Keith says he sees when he takes the Underground from one end of the city to the other, looking for work. But a ghost tree, cozy against the base of a larger redwood. Its bark and needles are white and it’s so very small, almost as small as Keith (Shiro is constantly amazed at this fact about Keith: so much life inside him! And he’ll never get taller!).

“Just a little one,” Shiro agrees. He concentrates and feels a thready root grow out from his little toe, creeping through the soil and the undergrowth until it tendrils into the ghost tree’s own network. 

Keith leans harder against Shiro’s knees. “Saying hello?” he asks. Keith always accepts these things about Shiro: the way he drinks green juice and sits in front of a sun lamp on cloudy days, the way he won’t keep live plants in the house, not because he’s opposed to them, but because they gossip too much and he can’t get anything done if there’s a geranium or a begonia chattering on about what the humidity might mean that day. Before going away from his grove to school, Shiro had never thought of these traits as strange. Now that he’s out of the school dormitory and living solely with the love of his life, he barely thinks of them at all.

“Something like that.” It’s never just a hello, with other trees. It’s a whole song, one without verses or chorus: a dirge, maybe. Shiro doesn’t listen to enough human music to make a comparison. The little ghost reaches back out and Shiro can feel the way it’s glad of the filtered light from the overhead canopy. It’s allergic to the sun. 

“I read about this kind of ghost,” Keith says. He sounds dreamy; probably he didn’t sleep well in Mbolu’s spare tent. Keith never sleeps well in strange places, and Shiro hadn’t wanted to lie next to him in a nylon shell. “They link up with the big trees and the big trees feed them. They can live a long time, even if they can’t make their own food.” 

“A little grove,” Shiro agrees. “It eats poison, too.”

“Muggles and their pollution,” Keith sighs, though Shiro’s not so opposed to pollution. Half his meals come from the smog that settles around the city after dark, and the carbon-rich sheen of the air always leaves Shiro feeling like he’s about to bloom, or his sap is ready to run. 

“Not Muggle poison,” Shiro corrects. “Heavy metals. Those happen everywhere.” 

The little ghost is curious about Keith, about the way Shiro is sheltering him. It wants to know, has Shiro found a ghost of his own? Is that what happens when trees grow legs? 

“It doesn’t have a name for you,” Shiro translates. “Funny, I thought this grove was popular with wizards. It wonders if you’re a ghost too.”

“Sort of,” Keith says. “I live in your shadow, don’t I? In your shelter, I mean.”

“Yes, I’m your own vine and fig tree,” Shiro says dryly. He reaches down and lifts Keith up onto his own two feet, the better to send out roots to the other trees in the grove. There’s an abundance of species here and they’re all _talking_. Shiro forgot that old groves were like this. The willows and the cottonwoods along his home riverbank are noisy too; but he’s been away from more than the usual season. 

“Does it understand me?” Keith asks.

“Mostly,” Shiro answers. “It might. Maybe.”

“Covered all your bets, I see,” Keith laughs. “I’m Keith,” he says in the direction of the tree and its larger counterpart. “And Shiro’s already introduced himself.” Keith doesn’t say that he’s a wizard — that’s obvious just from looking at him, from absorbing the air he exhales: Keith has fire in his lungs. He could be dangerous, Shiro supposes, but he’s always thought of Keith’s fire as the kind that cleans. The redwoods seem to agree: they’re old enough that soot and flame have burnished them, and all the fire did was reawaken the plants that crawl beneath their sheltering arms. They shake their limbs in the air, so high up that it’s hard to see the movement; it’s more a gesture that’s felt.

“They say hello,” Shiro translates. They don’t, really; but there’s a lot of nuance, with trees. Shiro usually edits.

* * *

“Do you think it’s like that between us?” Shiro asks, later. “That you’re a ghost, I mean. Making a living in my shadow.”

Keith has a puzzled look on his beautiful face and he rolls over in his bedroll so he can dangle his head and shoulders out of the tent, the better to see Shiro in the dark. Mbolu has Muggle twinkle lights strung up across the yard and she’s enchanted them to flicker like stars in the dark. The faint light scatters across Keith’s face. “I’m not a ghost,” he says. “But I didn’t think the ghost tree was a shadow, Shiro. I thought it was something good.”

“Not a real ghost,” Shiro complains, thinking _no, not_ yet _a ghost._ “But you’re not beholden to me. Are you?”

“Aren’t you the one who told me you wanted to see the world with me?” Keith says. Shiro can hear the moment Keith gives up his night’s rest as a bad job and clambers fully out of the tent to come and straddle Shiro’s thighs, curling into the lee of Shiro’s chest. It’s the easiest thing to wrap his human arm around Keith when he cuddles in like this, to cross his wooden arm over Keith’s knobby spine, so Keith is within the shelter of Shiro’s branches. “Hey, Shiro. Shiro, have you been reading consent forms at work again?”

“I’m always reading consent forms at work,” Shiro points out. “It’s part of my job to make sure the plants and the wizards are both informed.”

“Yeah, okay,” Keith sighs. “I love you.”

“I’m going to live a long time,” Shiro blurts out. He has a terror of it now, of knowing that one day Keith will not be alive and Shiro will return to his grove, and no matter how many other willows grow around him, it will always feel empty. 

“I’d certainly hope so,” Keith says. “I will too. Wizards tend to. I was hoping we could spend that time having adventures and planting gardens and probably cleaning out the bathtub, you always leave rings behind after you have a soak. Shiro, none of these things are surprising.”

Put like that, Shiro thinks that maybe Keith _is_ a little like the ghost tree: he’s filtering out all of Shiro’s night terrors and replacing them with true things, good things, things they’ve already spent hours talking over. Usually the terror is the other way around. Keith has dreams of fire because that may or may not be how he ended up in the magical foster system. No one knows, and the mystery is akin to being pecked by a woodpecker: insistent. Annoying. A sign of a creature burrowing deep beneath the bark. 

Keith is such a comfort to him. Shiro can feel himself blooming slightly, out of season. If Keith does die, Shiro supposes, his body can be buried among Shiro’s roots — for Shiro will root then, irrevocably, never to walk the world again. He’ll grow wide and tall and old and he’ll bury his feet in the cage of Keith’s ribs. 

Keith prods at Shiro. “You’re getting macabre. I can tell.”

Shiro huffs a breath right into Keith’s upturned face. “It’s my nature.”

“Bah,” Keith says. “That’s part of _nature_ , sure, but you’re a little beyond that.” He stretches and Shiro feels the pinprick glow of fire under Keith’s skin, warming the both of them. It’s a nice night; there’s no need for Keith to coddle Shiro like a hothouse plant. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to come inside the tent?”

“I’m not sleeping in that nylon bag,” Shiro says. “You should stay out here with me. Come on, you know I can repel mosquitoes. You don’t even have to cast a charm.”

“Mmm, if you’re going to repel mosquitoes, then why aren’t you doing it?” Keith accuses. “You’re a terrible pillow, whoever said willows had soft wood obviously never tried hugging one of you.”

“I’ll always have hard wood for you, baby,” Shiro leers halfheartedly. 

“There you are,” Keith says. “I’m going back to bed.”

When the morning creeps in, Shiro feels his dread slink away. It’s been a foggy few days and he’s missed the sun; the lack of light and the thin nutrients in the ground haven't been helping his mood. He tries to make up for it by making Keith’s morning tea and asking a neighborhood mulberry bush where to look for breakfast. The bush is well-acquainted with the decomposing wrappers from assorted baked goods — the local squirrels keep it well-mulched — and then Shiro’s off, wandering up and down the hilly streets in search of a bakery that matches the half-rotted descriptions. 

Walking around in the Muggle part of town is an adventure. Shiro’s well-educated enough that he charms his wooden arm to look like a prosthetic, and he’s perfectly capable of using debit cards to make a purchase; Keith’s always kept two sets of finances, in Muggle and in wizarding money, so Shiro’s had practice in managing the conversions. 

“Why do you keep Muggle money?” He asks Keith when he returns, brandishing a quiche and a fruit-and-nut biscuit; it was the only thing in the bakery case that vaguely resembled mulch. “It’s asparagus, I thought we could share.”

Keith looks up from his tea and makes room for Shiro to sit beside him; he allows Shiro to deposit a bit of the quiche in his mouth. Once he swallows, he tells Shiro it’s an old habit — though how it can be old when Keith’s only been emancipated for two years is somewhat beyond Shiro.

“Money is like compost,” Keith finally says. “It lets me do things, but I’ve got to let it mature before it’s any good.”

Shiro, who has more than a passing understanding of economics, lets this go. 

“In the meantime,” he says, eating his half the quiche, “where shall we explore next? We’ve all the time in the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Ghost (albino) redwoods exist!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albino_redwood) I have not yet seen a standard redwood, though. One day.


End file.
